Harry Potter > Twilight

So as I was having my lazy evening last night and kicking back with my Chinese, I flipped through the channels only to discover that the first Twilight movie was playing on HBO. I had never seen it and, truthfully speaking, had never really had the desire to. However, in keeping with my lazy evening, once it started I was too lazy to change the channel. I have heard the "Twilight is the new Harry Potter" comparisons, which I always scoffed at, but as I never saw the movies or read the books I felt I couldn't really weigh in on the debate.

So what did I think of the Twilight movie? For starters, I nodded off twice during the first hours and had to rewind my DVR to understand what was going on. I thought the movie was pretty terrible. The acting was horrible, the writing was atrocious and the effects were just awful. I'm sure the books are better, as they almost always are, but you won't see me picking one up to read anytime soon because nothing about that storyline hooked me in at all. The premise of the Twilight stories isn't even all that original to me. Ten years ago, when I was a dorky high schooler I loved the show "Roswell" that was on the WB, which to me is pretty much the same premise as Twilight. A quiet girl falls in love with her biology lab partner, a handsome mysterious outsider at the school, after he saves her life using his supernatural abilities. His family and friends are beautiful outcasts from the school who keep to themselves and are unhappy that he revealed their secret to her. Relationship complications ensue because of his supernatural status and the danger it puts her in. Yada yada yada. There seem to be an awful lot of similarities. I'm not saying Roswell was completely original and the show went downhill pretty fast, but to me Twilight is just a new twist on an age-old story and it's not even told all that well. I'm all for a good love story, but the chemistry in the movie was pretty nonexistent and Robert Pattinson was just downright creepy! There is absolutely no comparison to Harry Potter!

In Harry Potter - both the books and the movies - are very original and have more layers to them than just a girl who can't live without a boy. I'm all for romance like I said, but come on. Even if it just in a movie, hearing the words "I would rather die than live without you" just make me want to vomit. Perhaps the books shed a little more light on this, but Bella doesn't seem to have much of an identity outside of her infatuation with Edward. Not something I really want to see in my heroine. I love all the themes in Harry Potter - friendship, death, loss, free will, prejudice, bigotry, and love in so many different forms. You have parental love, unrequited love, platonic love, sibling love, first loves, crushes. It's not just this over-the-top "I can't live without you" and "we're meant to be together" kind of love. It's characters have substance and depth, which are brought out wonderfully in the books, but that you can see brought to the screen through the wonderful acting of men like Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon. I also love the reality of adolescence as it is depicted in the books over the years. Not everyone is a new girl who automatically makes friends and gets the most handsome guy in school. I'm a tried and true history dork and do not read very much fiction at all, but I love and have reread the HP books.

My last reason for why I think Harry Potter is superior to Twilight (and then I promise I'm done) is because I think it's fanbase stretches far and wide and it has much more reach. I remember being so surprised at my old job at how many teenage boys dug the Harry Potter movies and read the books. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many men who have sat down with the Twilight books or voluntarily gone to see either of the films. Harry Potter is something I can share with my friends, my mom, my kids (when I have them), my students, even my boyfriend.

As I said, I'm sure the books do the Twilight story a lot more justice, but I like the multi-layered story in HP much more than the single story that was presented to me in Twilight. I was hoping the movie would help shed some light on the Twilight craze and why so many of my students still walk around with vampire shirts or binders that have "Team Jacob" written on them, but it did not. If anything it explains why so many of my kids think a boy will solve all their problems and be the answer to everything. Harry Potter wins. Harry Potter always wins!

PS - just a random rant: why weren't vampires this popular when I was in high school and got ridiculed for liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (still in my opinion the best show EVER)

Feeling old

Is it bad when the weekend arrives and all I want to do when I get back from work is collapse on the couch and sleep? I miss the days when Friday night meant making plans and going out and having fun. Now all Friday night means to me is I can go to sleep early! I am so wiped from this week. I had a field trip with my seniors and 2 track meets this week. I didn't get back to the school from one of the meets until about 9:30. Add in a 40 minute commute home and you have a very long "hump day" on Wednesday. This week just felt super super long. It took forever just to get to Wednesday and I feel like I barely made it to Friday.

Now Friday is here and all I want to do is sleep. I just hate being this exhausted all the time. I want to do fun things on the weekend and learn how to play tennis with Kendra and go visit my grad school pals up in Charlottesville. By the end of the week I'm so exhausted and backlogged with grading and cleaning and laundry that I hardly ever leave my room. I'm only 26, but I feel so old!

Honestly, I can't figure out if I feel "old" or I just don't know what 26 feels like. I feel like it's a very diverse age and you can have young single people who still live it up on the weekends and people who are also married with kids. I get told all the time that "I'm still young" and should be out having fun, but maybe it's the fact that the only people I ever hang out with and see on a regular basis here are all married and/or have kids. I had my share of fun in and after college, but I've never been one for going out. I'm definitely attracted to a slower pace and lifestyle. Maybe that makes me boring, maybe it makes me old, I don't know.

Today I had a couple students come in off their lunch break to make up a test and I had my pathetic little teacher lunch out on the desk and I was reminded of a My So Called Life episode where Angela comments on how sad teachers' lives are and they zoom in on this frumpy middle-aged woman eating a tuna sandwich. When my kids came in and I took out my pathetic lunch I suddenly felt like that frumpy middle aged woman. I'm sure I look awful some days when I go into work. Most days I barely have time to run a comb through my hair nevertheless put on makeup. Lots of days I forget to eat breakfast and run out the door without taking a lunch. I end up eating school lunches or grabbing one of the frozen dinners I have stored up in the teacher's lounge. I have to remind myself that this whole 'being exhausted all the time' gig that comes with being a first year teacher is only temporary. Next year HAS to be better than this year and if I end up at a different school I don't know if coaching will be on my repertoire. As much as I love it, it is sucking the life out of me.

I miss blogging and wish I could get to a computer more often. Until June 11 I think once a week will pretty much be par for the course for me.

Thankfully, we only have one meet next week and it is a varsity meet that I think we are hosting. We run a pretty quick meet and usually finish up in about 2 hours, which means I will hopefully be home before 8 PM. I start my SOL review next week, which is the 2 week review for the big Virginia state test. It will be stressful to review everything we have learned since August, but will be nice not to have to plan actual lessons anymore. SOL review is just drill, drill, drill, drill.

My Seniors have their prom this weekend and I was asked about 12 times today by my kids if I was going to be there. It's Saturday night and I've already been invited by my grad school friends to go up to Charlottesville and hang with them for the weekend so I am torn. I honestly would just like to stay here and do nothing. I get so lazy on the weekends it's not even funny. I think I will probably end up donning a dress and going to prom. I was flattered they asked me to attend. I figured they would want it to be "their" night and wouldn't want teachers anywhere within a 5 mile radius. The faculty sponsor for the seniors, the 12th grade English teacher who I conference with all the time about my kids, encouraged me to go. She will be there so who knows. Maybe I'll revisit my high school days and go hit up the prom for an hour or so. It will probably make me feel even older than ever!

Right now all I want to do is collapse on the couch though. I think before I do I may order Chinese and go pop in the "Brothers At War" DVD that I never finished from back in February. JC is going to a San Francisco Giants baseball game tonight, which he is super excited about. He's had a rough couple of weeks and didn't do as well on his speaking test this week as he wanted to so I'm happy he's going out and doing something fun. We've hardly talked this week at all, aside from a couple 5 minute phone calls and some texts and emails. I love talking to him and it is usually one of the highlights of my day, but twice this week he called and I was already passed out and slept right through it. He left me a super sweet voicemail and I replied the next day with an email. And that's just how we roll. I know he's thinking about me. He know I'm thinking about him. We just have to focus on our careers right now so we're making good decisions and focusing on our studies. Do I hate that I'm so busy? Yes. Do I know there is an end in sight? Absolutely. The end of the school year is now only 7 weeks away!

And I'll see him soon enough and we'll have an awesome time tog ether this summer. I thought these weeks after our spring break together would be so painful and, no doubt, the first one back was. But we're back into the old routine now. We set aside time on the weekend to "be together" on Skype. We have our dinner dates. We email during the day. It's all good. Whether we have 2 months left of it or 12 more, we can kick this long-distance thing in the butt. Of that I am confident.

And on that note, I'm going to go order my crab rangoons, egg drop soup and Kung Pao chicken. Ah, Friday....

April 16, 2007

This post is a day late and was supposed to go up yesterday, but I ask all my blog readers to pause and remember the 32 people killed at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.

I had just returned from a trip visiting UVA when the news of this story broke. I was only 2 years out of college and I saw so many people I went to college with in the faces of the victims. One young man in particular jumped out at me. His name was Ryan Clark or "Stack" as he was known by his friends. I never knew him, but his picture and story captivated me in a completely unexpected way. Ryan was an RA in the residence hall where the first life in this tragedy, that of 19 year old Emily Hilscher, was taken. As a resident adviser, he walked over to investigate what was going on and make sure his residents were alright, was shot in the neck and killed. A bright young man, whose smile could apparently light up a room, who spent summers volunteering at a summer camp for special needs children, who was a month from graduating with a triple major and intended to pursue a PhD in neuroscience, gone just like that. Simply because he went to go make sure everything was alright.

I don't know why Ryan affected me the way that he did. I obviously did not know much about him, but as I said it was his picture and smile that captivated me most. The more I read about him the more I could see that the world lost an amazing young man. The world lost 32 amazing men and women that day. Lives snuffed out too soon for no reason at all. I felt helpless like most of the nation and wanted to do something to help the grieving friends and family and to make sure the memory of these students did not fade as the years go by. So I decided to honor Ryan in a very unconventional way. I made a video, using pictures people submitted to his Facebook memorial page and newspapers around the country, quotes from online tributes and messages left for Ryan. The purpose of the video was simply to remember Ryan and his life.

I could never have imagined the response that it got. It hasn't reached Susan Boyle fame, but 13,000 people have viewed the video and for those 3:30 second they remember Ryan. I have received many emails and messages about the video over the years, including a CBS news broadcaster who informed me that he had played the video for Ryan's mother and sister, strangers from around the world and a close friend who informed me how the video was shared with all Ryan's fellow Marching Virginians.

To this day, I still can't explain why exactly Ryan touched me so much considering I never met him. Maybe it was the smile, maybe it was that he reminded me of classmates I knew, perhaps it was the knowledge that in his 22 years on this earth he accomplished more than some people will in a lifetime. Just like Ross Almedinne, Jarrett Lane, Matthew La Porte and Lauren McCain and all the lives taken that day. Pause today and remember them. Say a prayer for their families and challenge yourself to give and do more with your life. That is Ryan's legacy to me.

I'm Alive!

I'm not sure how long exactly how it has been since I posted anything, but I assure you it's not 'cos I haven't wanted to. I've had a few blog posts that I've wanted to post rattling around in my head all week, but haven't even had the time to go grocery shopping this week nevertheless sit down and blog. There is lots that I would like to include in this entry, but I don't have time and just wanted to share the most amazing story ever about the wonders of the blogging world and how incredible it is.

Thanks to my best pal, Kara, an amazing good Samaritan and the New Balance company, my athletes will finally have actual running shoes!! Not hand-me downs, not lightly used donations, but top of the line New Balance running shoes.

So here's the story about how amazing the blogging community and people in general can be. My friend Kara runs an amazing health/marathon training/wellness blog over at . She is actually the reason I started blogging. She has made so many positive changes in her life and is able to successfully juggle so many things in her life and she somehow manages to document it all on her blog. I don't know how she does it. She is seriously such an amazing inspiration to me. Anyway, back to how she got my kids shoes! I told her one day when we were chatting about how frustrating it was to see these kids run around the asphalt track in skateboard shoes and basketball sneakers. She mentioned it on her blog. One of her blog readers works for New Balance. This amazing reader thought New Balance might be interested in helping out my track team. She asked for sizes and I got 17 sizes and emailed them to her, still very hesitant that anything would actually happen. That was last week over Spring Break. I returned Monday to discover an email that said New Balance was getting all the sizes together and just needed an address where to send them. I sent them her way, completely amazed that this was taking place, but still somehow skeptical. Maybe I'm just a pessimist. Maybe I was just in shock, but I resigned myself into thinking that it would take a month for the shoes to get there. I know, I know, I'm such a pessimist. I think I was honestly just in disbelief. I could not believe that a company could possibly be so generous. She emailed me the next day to tell me New Balance sent the 20 pairs of the New Balance 760's in both men's and women's sizes!

They should be here early next week! I am hoping they miraculously arrive on Monday so our kids will have them to the meet that day. We don't have sweats or jackets or cool t-shirts or anything like that. The track team, despite winning a state championship about 4 years ago, is pretty much the lowest team on the totem pole at this high school. Football is king and baseball and softball, especially, are really popular. The kids that run track get very little notoriety or respect at this school. It's a hard sport and I'm immensely proud of the kids who have stuck with it. I CANNOT wait to see the looks on their faces when they get these shoes. I am definitely going to bring my camera and cannot wait to get a picture of them holding up the shoes and then trying them on. I am hoping to submit an article to the local paper thanking New Balance. I am still in shock that they would so freely donate almost $2,000 worth of shoes to a school in need without any annoying paperwork or verification of students "in need".

I just cannot wait for the shoes to arrive. The other coaches who know these kids, the community, their families and where they come from, have told me most of them have nothing. They told me I'd be appalled if I saw where they live. One of my favorite kids is a talented and hardworking sophomore who runs just about everything we ask him to, from the 100m to the 4x400 in basketball sneakers and never says a word or complains about injuries or being tired or anything. He wears shoes that are a size too small and, apparently, he lives in a house where you can practically see the dirt floor. And now he's going to get brand new $100 running shoes!

Is this not the most amazing story EVER??? Thank you so much to everybody involved. Kara, Emily and most importantly NEW BALANCE!!!